Antique Religion - Buddha Said Heaven Welcomes All Pure and Good

Gautama Buddha (560-480 B.C.E.)was born a prince in the Sakya or warrior caste, the second highest in the Hindu faith of India. His mother died when he was young and the boy was brought in luxury with servants in a palace. When Gautama was 29 and just after the birth of his son he felt the need to leave and felt great sorrow at leaving his family. He wandered across the fertile Ganges plains to the tree covered hills of Vindhya hills where he lived for six years. Here Buddha practiced the usual ways of the ascetic then common among holy men in India. He shaved his head and beard, put on the yellow robes and tortured... Read more »

Meditation: The Art Of Self-Recovery

What you focus on determines your reality because your mind becomes active in acquiring and bringing into your reality the things that you focus on. You bring into your experience what you focus on. If you focus on lack, limitation, negativity, and scarcity, then that is what you bring into your experience. If you focus on abundance, expansion, positive things, and plenty, then that is what you bring into your experience. A moment of introspection will make this obvious. Why, then, if it is that easy to switch our reality, from one of suffering to one of joyful experience, do we persist in injuring ourselves? It is because we are not in charge of our minds. Rather our minds are in charge of us. We, a conscious being,... Read more »

An Evening With An Enlightened Man

It was a quiet night by the Ganges as the young man sat on the steps and watched the sun set over the holy waters. Despite the beauty of the scene, he did not appreciate it. The lilting cadence of the bathers chatting loudly seemed far away, and even their playful splashing of each other did not amuse him. Someone started chanting a bhajan about Krishna and the gopis and others soon joined him until their happy voices slapped on the shores of the river and made the mosquitoes pause in midair. This only irritated the young man more. He was worried about his job how little... Read more »

Resolving The Paradox Between Psychology And Spirituality

It seems that there is a contradiction between the psychology of transcendence and the spiritual idea of transcendence. Psychologists believe that through the proper application of intelligence and self-cognition one can have a full and enjoyable life, with wealth, health, and a great relationship, as well as a sense of communal belonging and contribution. Those in spiritual groups, in particular of an eastern orientation, believe that one has to get rid of the lustful ego that craves only fleeting... Read more »

Love Is The Answer To Happiness

The thesis of this discourse is this: love is the answer to happiness. Love, the most powerful force in creation, is also the most misunderstood. It is misunderstood because of the context with which it arises: that of relationship. All relationships imply love, either an offering of it or a withdrawal of it. Thus, our understanding of love is conditioned by varying degrees of attachment and aversion. And because of this, there is an element of self-protection that is projected outwardly and becomes control. Thus, our understanding... Read more »

For Your Eyes Only

Imagine what would happen if you made a decision not to be unhappy anymore. Yes, that’s right. Give it up. Quit being unhappy. Sure there are plenty of reasons to be unhappy–the unpaid bills, the ache in your shoulders, and your difficult parents, spouse, children, friends, and so on. In fact, if you really focus on it, the earth has always been a miserable place and if you read the newspapers it appears to be falling apart at the seams even faster than ever before. There are plenty of reasons to be unhappy. The sensory evidence just keeps piling up. On the other hand, there is only one reason to be happy. You’re alive! Do... Read more »

The Gift

Give yourself the gift of laughter, song, and love. Touch your life with your own magnificence. You are the ocean. Life itself. You are everything that you were meant to be. Touch your own soul; become whole once more. Everything is the way it is. Let yourself see it as it is. Free yourself from the delusions of despair. You cannot save the world from it’s nightmares, but you can save yourself; and in doing this, you will salvage the world; for it will see your clear light and hear your clear call. What... Read more »

Why You Are The Light Of The World

You are awesome. You are the light of the world. And in this brief essay, I will prove it to you. Your body is a superb machine whose functional details keep scientists in a state of awe and wonder. They estimate that your body has enough power to run a whole city for a week. Your mind is a computer that has billions of interconnected neurons. You may have enough raw brain power to run a galaxy. Yet there is something even more amazing about you. You are self-aware, the creator of yourself, and your own creation. You are more than a person, much more. You are a consciousness whose only limit is your own self-belief and imagination. And, whether you admit it or not, you are here on this... Read more »

Help Always, Hurt Never

Revenge, the desire to hurt others who have hurt us, only bears bitter fruit. It hurts those whom we have inflicted our wrath upon. And it hurts us, because no single act in the universe goes unrewarded. From that singular act, our own consciousness is wounded by the expression of our animalism. Nations pride themselves on the swiftness of their retribution but inevitably collapse in on themselves because the seeds of discontent that they sow, hurts all of life. Rome, the greatest civilization that the world had ever known, built on the finest arts and sciences known to the ancient... Read more »

How To Be Safe, Well, And Happy

The only way to live a happy, prosperous, successful and fulfilling life is to learn to express the love that is within you. When you meet yourself, others, and the life that you express with love, then you will change everything for the better. Who you are is an incarnation of love because what you seek, above all else, is to be well, safe, and happy and that is what love provides, an assurance and promise of well-being. The absence of love, the varying degrees of hatred, create conditions of distress that destroy the cells of the body and ruin the structure of a life, causing only illness, aging, stress, and destruction. The human condition as we know it, in all its distressing... Read more »